Postcard of the G. R. Kinney & Co. shoe store at the Delaware Building

Historical Article

The Delaware Building, located just north of the old junction (where Main and Delaware met at 9th), first appears in the 1913 Kansas City directory at an address of 812-820 Delaware.

In the old 1913 promotional post card, made for the G. R. Kinney & Co. Shoe Store, a store front apparently has been sliced off of each side of the building so that only the Kinney store would be pictured, numbers 814, 816 and 818. Numbers 812 and 820 are missing.

A sign on the store front reads Big Value .98c and another tells of a more expensive shoe, Great Value $1.95.

The electric street lamp at the front of the store shows the new street lights installed in Kansas City the year before, and which had come in for a good deal of discussion by Mayor Jost and the city council, who were striving for uniform city street fixtures.

A Kansas City Times story of Sept. 21, 1912, gives sketches of the proposed lamps and discusses the merits of the lamps upturned and downturned. The Frank Tilk Ornamental Iron Works designed the pole and fixture. The brackets (minus the top or fifth globe) were placed on trolley car poles on streets used by street car lines. The committee believed separate standards on those streets would mean too many poles.

As to finance, the story continues, the costs of the standards and brackets will be paid by the property owners, the electrical connections will be made by the electric light company which will supply the lights, while the city will furnish the current. The argument was made that the city would be able to afford this expense, since the arc lights previously used would be done away with.

G. R. Kinney Shoes were sold at the Delaware Street building from 1913 until 1930. There are seven stores today in Greater Kansas City. The firm, founded in New York state in 1895, is one of the largest retail distributors of shoes in America.

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